Written By Guest Blogger-Reciprocity Partner: Dianne James

Professor Nettie Wiebe has emerged as one of Canada’s most articulate opponents of a globalization model that serves transnational agri-business corporations at the expense of small farmers.

Nettie Wiebe grew up farming in Saskatchewan. Today she and her husband are still farming. But Nettie’s commitment to learning and to activism, along with her love of farming, have combined to create one of Canada’s most prominent women change makers. Nettie is the past president of the National Farmer’s Union, a Professor of Church and Society at University of Saskatchewan’s St. Andrew’s College, and a federal candidate for the New Democratic Party.  She is also a founding member of Via Campesina, Nettie was the first woman to serve on its governing body, the International Coordinating Committee (ICC).

Via a Skype connection, Nettie was able to be a guest presenter at the recent Food Connection Foundation ‘Food Sovereignty through Farmer Solidarity’ event that was co-ordinated as part of a visit to Australia by Via Campesina executive members.

This is her presentation……

This is so astonishing, speaking here from Saskatchewan, Canada and to think you are hearing me in Australia.  This is amazing. I want to bring my warmest greetings to you and I do wish I was there in person because I’m sure I would learn a lot more from you than I could possibly impart to you over these next few minutes.

But let me just say if the technology is not too problematic, I always like the discussion a lot more than the monologue, so I would really welcome questions and discussion.  But I’ll just launch in here and give you a bit of a background on who I am and why we in the Farmers Union in Canada have been so clear about our participation and the strengthening of La Via Campesina from our point of view.

I am an organic farmer in Saskatchewan, what we call a small scale family farm, and it is here as elsewhere in the world, a disappearing kind of farm.  Peasant and small scale agriculture is, as you know, under tremendous stress and attack, almost in all parts of the world, and especially so in the so called developed countries, like Canada, US, European countries, Australia and New Zealand.  We’ve sort of been at the cutting edge of the industrialization, the corporatization of agriculture, and that’s been tremendously hard on small scale farmers.

So I’m really excited that you’re working on the reconnecting of food to people, and to farming, and thinking about our food system in a more holistic way, and I think in a much healthier way.

We started with La Via Campesina because in the late 1980’s as you recall, we were in negotiations.  Your country, our country and most of the nations of the world, were in negotiations on the GATT and for the first time, agriculture was being included in the GATT negotiations.  So we were in a particular place here in Canada, because we had signed a few years previously into a trade agreement with the USA.  And you must know that the USA is 10 times bigger than we are, in almost every way.  We signed an agreement that had included agriculture and the removal of tariffs and the free flow of agricultural goods across our border into the USA.

We, as Canadian farmers already knew from our experience, that these kinds of agreements are tremendously beneficial to the trade, our trade numbers with the USA got a real boost.  They are tremendously profitable for the corporate sector and they put a lot of stress on and try to destroy farmer marketing boards, and any kind of farmer power in these kind of arrangements.

So we already knew about this, even though our negotiators and our government were really enthusiastic and our trade numbers were a success, and our agricultural goods were going up even more rapidly than they had predicted.  So from the official media and official government line it was a brilliant success.

Meanwhile we small scale farmers, we family farmers, were having a tougher time than ever and we were losing more farm families from the land than ever before.  So for us on the farmer level it was anything but a success.   It was very threatening.  When they arrived with the GATT negotiations, we realized that ‘oops’, they are going to do to the whole world what we’ve just experienced.

We were part of that small group of progressive farm leaders that talked together and said, let’s just look at how this is working for farmers, not for the trade, not for the export numbers, not for the production, but for farmers and farm families, and have a critical look at how this is affecting us all.

And remarkably, it became quite clear quickly that no matter whether you were a half hectare farmer in Indonesia, or a 2,000 acre farmer in Saskatchewan, that trade agreements, that liberalization of agricultural trade, was going to have a very negative affect on all of us.  Actually, we, as primary producers, small scale producers, are pretty much all in the same boat.

So that gave us a sense that we needed to be speaking for ourselves in these trade agreements, and we ought to have a voice, a global voice.  Until then, we had been organised in Canada on a provincial level, and eventually on a national level, because that was where our agricultural policies were being formulated.  Now it became clear that the way in which agriculture was going to be shaped for us, what we were going to be producing, who was producing, who would make any money on it and who would survive it, and in the end, who would eat and what they would eat, was going to be determined elsewhere in the world.  It was going to be determined by key trade negotiators, the big countries, and even more importantly, by the corporate sector, the transnational traders who were actually going to be in control of that production and trade.

We realised that we recognized the need to work in solidarity with farmers from around the world, who in many ways are very unlike us but in the key component of what we are defending are very like us.

When we got together – our first big assembly was in 1996 in Tlaxcala, Mexico, we hammered out a series of positions on trade, on care of food, on culturally appropriate food, on protections of our culture, our land and our water.  And importantly, and very importantly for me, on the recognition that if we were going to transform agriculture into a healthy and sustainable system, women would have a key role.  This was because in many of our households, and many of our farms, the work of women was largely unrecognized but was essential to the life of our families and our communities and to the health of our people.

In La Via Campesina in the beginning, the role of women and the leadership of women was a valuable and a very unique component of this global movement.  As you know, and I knew from my own experience in Canada, that the leadership of women in agriculture has been very tentative and often absent at the national and international levels.  It’s been the role of women to make sure that there’s eggs in the fridge and that the family food system works well, but beyond that, once you get to the agribusiness corporate room, there are painfully few women making key decisions around food and agriculture.

In Via Campesina we decided early on that the role of women was going to be an important component of this movement because we needed solidarity in a way which farm organisations haven’t achieved or even imagined, before we were catapulted into this global context of defending our ground.

So in Tlaxcala in 1996, we took care that there would be at least one woman, and it turned out to be myself that time, on the international co-ordinating committee, that would work globally to try and solidify and build solidarity among very diverse and autonomous farm organisations.  That part is important in Via Campesina because not only do we tolerate diversity, we cherish diversity, culturally and agriculturally.

It’s as important culturally as it is for our biodiversity, that we protect and honour differences and allow for and encourage that we move away from monocultures and one kind of a diet globally, and that’s what corporate agriculture offers us.  McDonalds burger in Bangkok that tastes very much like the McDonalds burger in Saskatchewan.  That’s where monoculture of food and monoculture of production is very destructive, environmentally and in terms of biodiversity, and it’s very destructive culturally.

So in Via Campesina, we embrace that kind of diversity, knowing that all of our futures depend on that sustainability, on those differences being there, and in the kind of food we produce.  We know that we produce in different food environments, in different agronomic environments, in different political environments, and we need to make sure that that continues to be the case.

Question: How do you get on with Monsanto?

Answer: We have a very contentious relationship with Monsanto.  Monsanto has, since 1996, had a commercial GMO canola which is now so widespread, and so contaminating, that we organic farmers are unable to grow any canola at all because we can no longer be assured that it’s not contaminated.  All of the so called conventional canola in western Canada has GMO strains in it.  So we have no more non GMO crop, and for this kind of mass biological contamination, we have no remedy.  As a matter of fact, Monsanto takes no responsibility or has any liability for this kind of contamination.  They own the technology, they sell it at a very high price to those growing canola, they have a corner on the market, and that’s the position we are in. Monsanto in some ways is the poster boy for what’s wrong with the global situation now.

Question: What were the sorts of challenges the NFU faced over the years in maintaining a focus on international farming issues when you’ve had so many issues locally and nationally, as we do in Australia?

Answer: My goodness, I feel like I’m back in my president’s chair because one of the things I faced repeatedly was exactly that question.  We would be in a farmers meeting and farmers would say to me, look we have all this trouble here in Canada, what are you doing spending this time working internationally.   Why don’t we work nationally.  And I would walk everyone through it – we started with provincial, we went to national, and you know what, some of the main decisions that are affecting you, everything from the price of inputs to the export market to who sells what, to what you are being encouraged to grow, and certainly to the price you are getting, is in fact not being decided in our capital city.  It’s being decided around the trade tables and the corporate board tables, and if we are going to get any control of this, we are going to have to work globally.

And then I would say, as an encouragement, by the end of my tenure, and I was President for 4 years, by the end of that tenure that question never came again, because it became more and more obvious a lot of what was happening in our food system is in fact controlled elsewhere.

And that’s what Food Sovereignty is all about, it’s taking control back home around food related issues.  Water quality, who owns the land, what kind of seed we get to use, who grows food for us, we need to take those decisions back home.

Question: I was doing some research some years ago and couldn’t believe that there was no Via Campesina here in Australia, when it was in Canada, USA and Europe and the developing world.  And I thought why haven’t Australian farmers risen up and taken part in this organisation.  I’m absolutely thrilled to be here today and I’m just wanting to ask you, what are the steps we should take here in Australia to establish this wonderful organisation here.

Answer: Let me begin there by saying that I don’t feel like I’m in any position to give advice.  Here are some ideas: It’s important that farmers have their own voice and that they delineate what’s important to them.   Often that farmers voice, and that’s particularly true here in Canada, and probably in Australia, that the farmers voice is really manipulated and diverted by all of the experts and the agribusiness interests that want to ensure that farmers continue to produce what they need for their profits, and are completely unconcerned about the well being of farm families, rural communities, soils, waters etc.

It’s been hard for farmers to divest themselves of those manipulative forces that want to delink them, decouple them, from their own real interests in agriculture.  So that’s been part of that struggle.  The struggle has been close to home.  How confident we feel about what we’re doing and how empowered we are to say what we need to say.

But if you’ve got strong organisations, even local organisations -  within Via Campesina we’ve been very conscientious not to be insistent that an organisation has to already have all the farmers in that country as part of its membership, or anything like that.  Small organisations can join the regional Via Campesina, and begin to work in solidarity with others in their regions for the international changes that we need to affect.

I know that one of the big areas for us in industrialized countries, is to actually consider ourselves to be peasants, and I know that in USA and Canada when I have addressed farmers, I begin by saying we are peasants, and you can just see them, there’s a sort of unease.  In the English language, peasant has begun to be an insult, and then I clarify that peasant actually means, people of the land, and if we the people of the land want to ensure that the land remains productive and healthy and produces food for the all the people of the world, then we the people of the land need to be proud to be people of the land.

That’s why we should claim that culture of looking after our own soils, and being people of the land.  That’s what industrial farmers find very hard to do because they have been distanced from their own places.   We’ve been manipulated into thinking that somehow the more industrialized we are the further from the actual land we are, the more sophisticated our inputs, the more productive we are, bushels per acre, the better farmers we are.

It’s a crisis for us so it’s time for us to take back our position as those who care for the land, and those on whom the well being of our environment really depends. I always say that environmentalism in urban areas is extremely important, but you know what, the front line, the interface between us human beings and the land that feeds us is farmers.  And that’s never been a more important role than now.

So it’s that encouragement for farmers and food activists to take that back, their own voice, to understand the issues and draw the places where we need to take back control of seed, of agriculture production, what kind of production and try to stand in the way of the major land grabbing, divestment of people that is going on in agriculture.

The Kamburu Story -  This is a fantastic story of a Community-led Response to food insecurity It is a revealing insight into the power and dignity that emerges from the authentic practice of  food sovereignty principles.

The video shares the experience of The Gaia Foundation’s Kenyan partner, The Institute of Culture & Ecology (ICE) , as they work with the Kamburu community of central Kenya.

This story shows the courageous steps of the community as they re-learn and enhance indigenous organic farming methods. The programme has been community-led, in recognition that the agricultural knowledge needed for food sovereignty are already within the community.

In listening to voices of the community members we can see how in just 18 months the people of Kamburu have created a food surplus and are now sharing their learnings with neighbouring communities.

VIVA Food Sovereignty!!

Written By Guest Blogger-Reciprocity Partner: Dianne James

With it’s agricultural neo-liberalist policies, Australia is an agricultural export powerhouse.  As a result, Australian farmers are now struggling to maintain sustainable local food systems with the continued growth and take over by agribusinesses producing for the global market.

It’s time to bring the voices of the small Australian farmer to the fore and start putting agriculture back in their hands.

For the first time in history, representatives from La Via Campesina (LVC) are travelling to Australia.  LVC is the organisation at the forefront of the global Food Sovereignty movement and represents the interests of over 150 million farming families.

Food Sovereignty means farmers and local communities exercising democratic control over our local, regional and national food systems.  It means food and agriculture serving people and the environment first, not profit.  It means the future, and it’s being built right now.

LVC delegates from Japan, Timor Leste, South Korea and Indonesia will arrive on June 24 for events in both Adelaide and Brisbane.

In Adelaide, the delegation is being hosted by Friends of the Earth, and will spend two days meeting with local farmers, and food and farming organisations.

The delegates will then travel to Brisbane where they are being hosted by the Food Connect Fondation.  Over two days, under the banner of “Food Sovereignity Through Farmer Solidarity”, farmers and their supporters will connect with one another and with members of LVC to talk about the future of food and farming in Australia, and globally.  Nettie Weibe, the first female President of the Canadian National Farmers Union and founding member of LVC, will be joining the discussion via Skype.

For more information, contact:

Adelaide:  joel.catchlove@foe.org.au 0435 631 524  Brisbane:  http://www.foodconnect.com.au

Written By Guest Blogger-Reciprocity Partner: Dianne James

Raj Patel is one of the few people who has both worked at the World Bank, and been tear gassed protesting against it. An activist scholar, and author of Stuffed and Starved, Raj argues that markets are a beautiful thing, but that modern capitalism has gotten it all wrong.

I have just read Raj’s new book, The Value of Nothing, which shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced.  Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, he says, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.  He argues there is a better way to value our world, and describes how social organisations are finding new ways to describe the world’s worth.

Raj says that the opposite of consumption isn’t thrift, it’s generosity.  The oldest civilizations and the latest neuro science agree that we are happiest when we govern ourselves and live as communities.  So if we don’t want the market to price every aspect of our lives, then we need to learn how social organisations have discovered democratic ways in which individuals can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and it’s resources.

Raj is also known for his work on food with the  Via Campesina movement, and through his work on urban poverty and resistance with Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Landless Peoples Movement.

Raj has recently visited Australia, speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival and  in Brisbane at a launch of his most recent book, where I had the pleasure of listening to him give his views of food, hunger and globalization and how we might live differently on this new earth of ours.

Here’s a great interview with Raj at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.  He talks about corporate dominance of global food production and battles to create democratic and sustainable food systems.  It’s really worth a look.

Segments: 0:00  Stuffed and Starved;  3:02 Who benefits from high food prices? 3:44  Another global food crisis? 6:27  Australia’s role in the world food system;9:19  Food sovereignty and La Via Campesina; 13:39  Land reform 16:46 Sustainable agriculture 101 Cuba 19:15  Supermarket organics; 20:50  Slow food: 22:25  The local food movement.

“Generosity makes us happiest. We’ll be happier people when we share, not when we impose, but when we learn from one another. Because when I’m connected to everyone I disappear … in being excellent you lose yourself. And when you’re connected to everyone, that’s the best thing that can happen.” Raj Patel

In this second video produced by Jesse Freeston of The Real News on the land conflict in the Aguán Valley,

we look at the roots of the conflict, and the motivation for the campesinos to begin the land occupation that eventually won them 11,000 hectares. We also look at what the experience in Aguán means for other conflicts in a country where the power struggle that gave rise to the June 2009 coup is far from over.

This excellent video once again allows the authentic voices of small famers to be heard and includes  interviews with Father Ismael “Melo” Moreno, Rosemary Joyce, and reporting from the land occupation in question.

The Government of Honduras mobilizes thousands of soldiers during negotiations with peasant plantation occupation. Campesinos tell their side of a story of intimidation and misrepresentation. A story where their legitimate and peaceful challenge to rich landlords is demonized by a propaganda campaign by government and media.

This video produced by Jesse Freeston of The Real News reveals the reality of how

“a tentative and controversial resolution has been reached in a long-standing land conflict in Honduras. The controversy lies in the mobilization of the military, in the form of at least 2,000 soldiers, to pressure the campesinos into signing the latest negotiated deal. The group of 3,500 campesino families has agreed to accept a total of 11,000 hectares from the Lobo government. The previously landless workers continue to occupy a series of African palm plantations in the fertile Northern Honduran valley of Aguán, until their access to the land is assured”

Their story offers us a graphic insight into the frightening challenges that some family farmers face as they seek the very basics of economic justice and agrarian reform.

Discovering the Global Peasant Movement – Key Campaign

At the heart of La Via Campesina’s global campaign of agrarian activism is their flagship framework of Food Sovereignty.

Food Sovereignty has become the rallying cry of an increasing number of peasant organisations and social movements around the world in search of alternatives to the current Neo-Liberal Agricultural Regime. It was first introduced by La Via Campesina at the World Food Summit in the NGO forum on food security in 1996.

Food Sovereignty promotes a radical transformation of existing agri-business frameworks to overcome the ongoing displacement, marginalisation, repression and persistent impoverishment of rural peoples. It offers a peasant-led solution to world poverty, environmental degradation and global survival.

Food Sovereignty – Key Elements (Bello, 2009)

1. The goal of agricultural policy should be food self-sufficiency. A country’s farmers should produce most of the food consumed domestically.
2. People should have the right to determine their patterns of food production and consumption, taking into consideration ‘rural and productive diversity’ and not allow these to be subordinated to unregulated international trade.
3. Production and consumption of food should be guided by the welfare of farmers and consumers, not the profit projections of transnational agribusiness.
4. National food systems must produce ‘healthy, good quality and culturally appropriate’ food primarily for the domestic market.
5. A new balance must be achieved between agriculture and industry, the countryside and the city, to reverse the subordination of agriculture and the countryside to industry and urban elites.
6. Equity in land distribution must be promoted through land reform, reversing consolidation of land by landlords and transnational firms. Reform should also include provisions for communal and collective forms of ownership and production that promote a sense of ecological stewardship.
7. Agricultural production should be carried out mainly by small farmers or cooperative or state enterprises, and the distribution of food should be governed by fair pricing schemes that take into consideration the rights and welfare of both farmers and consumers.
8. Industrial agriculture, based on genetic engineering and the original chemical-intensive Green Revolution, should be discouraged.
9. Traditional peasant and indigenous agricultural technologies contain a great deal of wisdom and represent the evolution of a largely benign balance between the human community and the biosphere.

Food Sovereignty directs participation in the international economy towards building local economic capacity rather than destroying it. It does not negate trade, but seeks to promote the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.

La Via Campesina’s Food Sovereignty moves us beyond the economics of narrow efficiency. It seeks to strengthen social solidarity by placing the values of equity, justice and community above and beyond the operations of the market.

Food Sovereignty ‘re-embeds the economy in society instead of having society driven by the economy’ (Karl Polanyi).

Discovering the Global Peasant Movement – How it works?

La Via Campesina offers a radical and exciting vision for the pre-eminent role of poor, marginalised peasant farmers (campesinas) in determining the future of global agriculture and perhaps even our planet: a vision that is strengthened through their innovative and ongoing work as the creators and maintainers of new and powerful engagement spaces.

A ‘Communal’ Space

Foundational to La Via Campesina’s uniqueness as a global peasant organization has been their ability to create a distinctive and provocative communal space. It is in this space that the ‘new’ peasant voice emerges as a valuable contributor to the global community.  To create and sustain this space, La Via Campesina employs multidimensional strategies, including:

• separating and establishing independence from their historical misrepresentation by government, agricultural and development institutions whose first priority has been and remains the promotion of their own interests and agendas.
• redefining and reframing what it means to be a peasant:  defining peasant agriculture as sustainable food production in harmony with local culture and traditions.
• taking the familiar and fundamental in peasant’s daily lives to impress on ‘others’ the profound importance of farmer’s relationships to seeds, the land and the planet.
• valorising and promoting traditional modes of food production as sources of great wisdom learnt from centuries of synergistic interaction with the environment.

A ‘Solidarity’ Space

In order to protect, sustain and grow this communal space, La Via Campesina works continuously to establish and maintain a robust solidarity space.  Their solidarity space offers an organisational and structural platform for accommodating the diversity of the international peasant experience and establishing common ground, unity of purpose and a shared understanding of each other’s realities.  Their key solidarity strategies are:

• constructing spaces for internal debates that enable national and local farmer organisations to share local experiences and knowledge, develop tactics and visions for organizing, and thereby create collective positions on actions and issues.
• providing the institutional space as an important arena of action, debate and exchange between different national and sub-national peasant and farmers groups -
  • Tri-annual international conferences as the highest decision making entity where representatives of member organizations engage in collective analysis and policy development, as well as negotiation and consensus building processes to define the political direction, strategies and internal functions of the movement.
  • Bi-yearly meetings of the International Coordinating Committee (ICC) where international agreements are evaluated and analysed in regions. The meetings involve collective analysis of global agricultural developments and the planning of international and national actions and advocacy.
  • International issue based working commissions with male and female regional representatives.  The focus of these working commissions is the coordination of all work on priority issues, ie agrarian reform, biodiversity, climate change, human rights.
  • Decision-making is achieved through consultation and consensus: articulating the concerns of the base within each national organization and having dialogue to reach common positions.  Emphasis is placed on taking the time to build consensus among members, thus establishing a strong basis of trust.

A ‘Political’ Space

Through the foundational strength of their communal space, and the unity of voice created through their solidarity space, La Via Campesina is able to generate an amazingly potent political space.  This space forms the vehicle for peasant wisdom to challenge, delegitimise and offer ‘peasant wisdom’ alternatives to the existing neo‑liberal, industrial agricultural regimes.  Their work in this space is defined through a series of carefully constructed  strategies of resistance.

• They work to politicise an agrarian policy that has for too long been depoliticised and rendered a merely technical exercise (the development project, food security and the Green Revolution).  When taking on an issue or institution, they seek to occupy and defend the political space, and then rapidly move the debate out of the ‘technical’ realm and onto a moral terrain of ‘right or wrong’, fundamentally shifting the terms of the debate.
• Their political style is that of a ‘poor peoples’ movement: people who have been pushed to the edge of extinction by dominant power in their countries and in the world, people who have usually not been taken into account, who have been fooled too many times, people who are never invited to sit at the table and had to elbow their way into the set they now occupy. They have a deep distrust of methods that ‘channel’ and ‘calm’ dissent.
• Their core campaign strategies include the deliberate non-engagement with neo-liberal institutions, complemented by a carefully targeted program of ‘expose and oppose’ of the foundations of agribusiness policy and practice: export trade, monoculture, large-scale industrial farming, the green revolution and biotechnology.
• La Via Campesina has made great use of knowledge politics.  Through the construction of alternative visions based on ‘citizenship’ space and rights‑based agricultural reform, La Via Campesina has created competing knowledge to challenge the dominant paradigms of agricultural production and their associated social and environmental issues.  Through this approach, La Via Campesina creates and fosters a political and ethical struggle over which knowledge and information is valid and which knowledge counts.

Through these new and powerful communal, solidarity and political engagement spaces, La Via Campesina and its marginalized, peasant-farmer members have the platform to offer the challenge to all who would seek to influence agrarian reform…

“Hey you there…NOT ABOUT US WITHOUT US…ever again!”

Written By Guest Blogger-Reciprocity Partner: Dianne James

Discovering the Global Peasant Movement – Why the Need?

A Persistant Western Mindset

Globalisation is a planned project of exclusion that drains the resources and knowledge of the people in the poorer nations of the world resulting in an obscene imbalance in livelihoods between the people of  “western” rich nations and those poorer nations in the “south”.

Global agribusiness has brought about a fundamental shift in the treatment of food – from a “necessity”critical to the survival of humans, to a “commodity” where profit comes before any other social or environmental need.

Feeding the people of the world is now dominated by this market-driven agribusiness paradigm, seen as the ‘best way’ forward, and bringing with it a deliberate strategy of disempowering and delegitimising peasant knowledge and voices.

This global policy and decision making is dominated by rich nations and is underpinned by a “western mindset” of paternalism, control and agricultural neo-liberalism.

Paternalism

Within the Western mindset, the majority world, commonly referred to as the “developing” or  “third world”, is most often portrayed as incompetent, inefficient, corrupt and steeped in cronyism. Traditional values and cultures, different from those of the West, are often viewed and portrayed as backward, out of date and totally without economic worth.

Western discourse on the majority world is framed within “development” contexts. These “undeveloped” countries need the knowledge, wisdom and resources of the West if they are to survive in the modern world. The Western driven IMF structural adjustment programs of the 80s, heralded the emergence of the Western “development” ideal: development programs, managed by Western NGOs, seeking to help the poor totally disregarding their capacity or right to be the best agents of their own development.

As trade and food security became more closely aligned with these notions of underdevelopment, fresh locally produced food has been portrayed as “backward” and highly processed food clothed in aluminium and plastic as “modern”.  In Western-agribusiness speak “development” is aligned to degrees of corporate control. Underdeveloped food systems are represented as decentralised, locally controlled and small-scale. On the other hand, developed food systems are represented as centralised, corporate controlled and global. The “development” of food systems is presented as a natural progression from small to big. Most significantly, peasant agriculture is considered less than ideal and part of the problem.

Control of South

In the 1950’s and 60’s, majority world countries wanted to restructure the world economy in a way that would lead to rapid development and a global redistribution of wealth. In response, northern countries set out on a process of global economic containment of these aspirations for development and redistribution of wealth.  This process involved a two-pronged strategy aimed at dismantling the role of majority world governments in their own economies and drastically weakening the United Nations system as a form and instrument for the majority world’s economic agenda.

Sponsored by northern governments and corporations, the economic instruments of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation (WTO) formed three overlapping bureaucracies to structurally constrain and control the majority world aspirations and interests.

The single, clearest, most direct result of economic globalisation to date is a massive global transfer of economic and political power away from national governments and into the hands of global corporations and the trade bureaucracies they helped create.

Agricultural Neo-Liberalism

At its ideological heart, agricultural neo-liberalism is founded on free trade, often called trade liberalisation, as the vehicle for world development and the panacea for world economic issues.

Its key characteristics include the deregulation and privatisation of as much economic activity as possible, and the rapid commodification of every remaining aspect of life.  Fundamentally, it is a system of trade designed and constructed to place economic values and corporate self-interest above all other values.  The goal of agricultural neo-liberalism is profit gained through greater and cheaper access to scarce resources, new markets and cheap labour of the majority world, with little to no consideration of environmental and social costs.

In essence, agricultural neo-liberalism has replaced peasant producers maintaining sustainable local food systems with capitalist entrepreneurs producing for the global market

The result for the majority world of this persistent western mindset of paternalism, control and agricultural neo-liberalism, has been the loss of livelihoods for millions of farmers; the depression of rural communities; an increase in hunger in many parts of the globe; compromised nutrition and food safety; increased environmental destruction; and the control of food production and distribution by an ever smaller number of giant global agribusinesses.

The people of the majority world have been the most direct victims of this globalisation project.  They have also been its most astute and ardent critics. It is critical that their voices be heard.

Viva La Via Campesina!

References:

Debi Barker: http://www.bioneers.org/presenters/debi-barker-1

Debi Barker and Jerry Mander http://www.ifg.org/wto.html

Walden Bello: http://www.waldenbello.org/

Francisco VanderHoff Boersma: http://www.springerlink.com/content/f4260p41u8600205/

Jerry Mander: http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/mander1.html

Raj Patel: http://rajpatel.org/

Dr Vandana Shiva http://www.vandanashiva.org/